Tag: Tough History Coming

Today’s Quote of the Day comes from Victor Davis Hansons’s Works and Days column The New Commandments on the Barn Wall. There are too many to choose from in that short, pithy, depressing piece, but I’m going with this one:

8) Neanderthals need nerds. The cool gang banger who is knifed on Saturday night suddenly in extremis worships the surgeon who stiches up his liver and kidneys — a target whom he would otherwise have robbed earlier that Saturday afternoon. The thug who strips the copper wire from our streetlights nonetheless assumes a nerdish engineer will keep designing the wiring scheme that runs his car’s CD. For the good life to go on, each illiterate punk demands one corresponding graduate student at MIT to take care of him. When the former outnumber the latter, then civilization usually winds down.

“The worst thing about living in the declining era of a great civilization…is knowing that you are.” – R.A. Heinlein

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. – Thomas Sowell

From The Corruption of America, linked yesterday:

What gives me confidence for the future? Gun sales, for one thing. U.S. citizens legally own around 270 million firearms – about 88 guns per 100 citizens (including children) today.

That’s a hard population to police without its consent. America is the No. 1 country in the world as ranked by the number of guns per-capita. That plays a major factor in the kind of government you will see take root in America. Things might go too far in this country for a while… And I’d argue they’ve been going the wrong way for too long. But the government can only take things so far before they’ll be faced with a very angry, well-armed opposition.

If the government attempts to take our guns… my opinion would change immediately. But that’s one right the Supreme Court has been strengthening recently. It gives me hope that most people in America still understand that the right to bear arms has little to do with protecting ourselves from crime and everything to do with protecting ourselves from government…

RTWT. I mean it.